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Book Review: Love at First Flight by Tess Woods PLUS a look at her next release

Love at First Flight…

Book Description:

Looking back on it now, I can see it was instant. The second we locked eyes. Boom. Just like that. The me I had spent a lifetime perfecting began its disintegration from that moment. And despite the carnage it brought to all our lives, I still don’t regret it.

What would you risk to be with the love of your life? And what if your soul mate is the one who will destroy you?

Mel is living the dream. She’s a successful GP, married to a charming anaesthetist and raising a beautiful family in their plush home in Perth. But when she boards a flight to Melbourne, she meets Matt and her picture perfect Stepford life unravels as she falls in love for the first time ever.

What begins as a flirty conversation between strangers quickly develops into a hot and obsessive affair with disastrous consequences neither Mel nor Matt could have ever seen coming. Mel’s dream life turns into her worst nightmare.

Love at First Flight will take everything you believe about what true love is and spin it on its head.

My Thoughts:

First and foremost, I’m going to start this review by stating WOW!! This novel is an amazing study in human nature. Tess Woods has skilfully crafted two normal, everyday human beings only to push them to the brink of obsession and insanity, taking them way past the point where I was able to still like them or feel any degree of empathy towards them. Yet, I still remained invested in their journey, right to the very end.

Infidelity. That most controversial of topics.

The reason this novel works though is that it’s not so much a story about an affair, as it is a story about the repercussions of an affair. In this, Tess navigates the reader through a veritable minefield of material. The last 100 pages or so were the ones that cemented this story for me. From ‘the day of reckoning’ onwards, I was riveted. There were times when I absolutely loathed Mel, the main character. I had to dig deep to feel anything but contempt for her. Matt was at times equally as despicable, yet my dislike for him was tempered somewhat as on a whole, I felt he was a much more honest human being than Mel. I adored Adam and was entirely heartbroken for him. As you can see, I was wrapped up, not only in the story, but in the characters and who they were under the gaze of my own microscope of humanity.

The ending was satisfactory, if not a little on the sad side in getting there, but life is like that. Not everything ends up sunshine and roses and sometimes even when it does, it’s a long hard road to achieve that end.

I enjoyed this novel so much. I read it rather quickly, keeping it close by so I could read bits whenever I had a few spare moments and it’s been a long time since I’ve done that. You know you’ve got it bad when you’re reading while stirring spaghetti on the stove!

I can highly recommend this novel and to those who might be indecisive about reading it because they don’t like books about affairs, all I can say is that it’s not what you think it’s going to be!! And that’s the only spoiler you’ll get from me!

Much to my excitement, Tess has a new novel coming out, and it’s a follow up to Love at First Flight, turning the spotlight onto Mel’s grown children, Nick and Lily.

Beautiful Messy Love

What happens when love and loyalty collide? Two couples must deal with the consequences of their messy love not just for themselves but for those who depend on them. For lovers of passionate romance in the vein of Nicolas Sparks.

When football star Nick Harding hobbles into the Black Salt Cafe the morning after the night before, he is served by Anna, a waitress with haunted-looking eyes and no interest in footballers famous or otherwise. Nick is instantly drawn to this exotic, intelligent girl. But a relationship between them risks shame for her conservative refugee family and backlash for Nick that could ruin his career.

Meanwhile, Nick’s sister, Lily, is struggling to finish her medical degree. When she meets Toby, it seems that for the first time she is following her heart, not the expectations of others. Yet what starts out as a passionate affair with a man who has just buried his wife slips quickly into dangerous dependency.
Through attraction, breakups, triumphs and tragedies, these two couples learn just how much their beautiful messy love might cost. A West Side Story for the modern day.

Love at First Flight was book 8 of my 2016 Australian Women Writers Challenge, read and reviewed in September 2016. Review previously published on Goodreads and Facebook but appears here on the blog now, for the first time.